The present invention relates to failover mechanisms, and more specifically, to a method and apparatus for implementing an automatic failover mechanism for clients accessing a resource through a server.
A typical client-server database system includes a client, a database server, and a database. The client portion includes two main components, a database application and a client driver interface. The database application issues database language commands, such as SQL (Structured Query Language) commands, and provides an interface to a user through a keyboard, screen, and pointing devices such as a mouse. The client driver interface, on the other hand, provides the connection and communication interface between the client and the database server.
A connection is a communication pathway between a client and a database server and a specific connection between a client and a database server is termed a database session. The database server responds to the database language commands sent from the client by executing database operations for accessing and manipulating a physical database. A logical unit of work that is comprised of one or more database language commands is referred to as a transaction.
Contained within the database server is the session state data that reflects the current transaction state of the database session. To initiate a database session, human intervention is required to manually log onto a database application. The logging on process establishes a new database session by connecting a client with a database server.
Normally, the database session lasts from the time the user connects until the time the user disconnects or exits the database application. However, if a database session failure occurs, the connection between the client and the database server is lost. Once the database session fails, the user will observe a visible interrupt in his service as access to the database is terminated. To continue accessing the database, the user must reconnect a client to an active database server. This requires human intervention to manually log back onto the system to establish a new database session.
Besides requiring human intervention to manually log back onto the system, the failure of a database session creates other significant problems to the user. Because the logon process creates a new database session, all previous transactions that were not complete at the time of the failure are lost. Thus the user must resubmit all lost transactions once the connection to the database is reestablished.
Based on the foregoing, it is desirable to provide a mechanism for handling the failure of a database session without requiring someone to perform manual reconnection steps. Additionally, it is also desirable for users not to lose session state data on the occurrence of a database session failure.
A method and system for recovering after failure of a first server to which a client was connected for accessing a resource is provided. When it is detected that a connection between the first server and the client has failed, the client is automatically connected with a second server that has access to the resource. After automatically connecting the client, the client accesses the resource through the second server. The client stores information about the state of the session with the first server so that processing can continue where it left off after the client connects with the second server.
The client may be pre-connected to the second server prior to the failure of the first server to reduce the latency caused by switching in response to a failure. The second server may be configured to pre-parse the commands that the client issues to the first server to further reduce the latency associated with switching to the second server.